Quote:
Originally Posted by BlackArcher101
The complexity of having a fleet of self driving cars operating perfectly in any condition/environment is magnitudes greater than those simple technological advances, but people are thinking it's simple.
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Nobody thinks it's "simple", they're saying it's *possible*, and that objections like "well what about when it SNOWS, huh?" aren't questions that haven't already been considered. If a human driver can handle a situation, then there is no reason a computerized system can't theoretically handle it - end of argument.
Unlike many fields, driving requires no creativity, it is entirely rule-based, which is something humans aren't particularly good at, and computers are. You don't consciously drive a car by deciding things using your high-end mental faculties, you do it by habit, reflex, and experience, none of which are irreducible to logic trees.
I personally doubt very much that the end system is going to use GPS or track other cars as networked entities, except as secondary or navigation systems. Each car will be autonomous and will behave much like fish in schools or birds in flocks, both of which are becoming better and better understood and reduced to algorithms. Unlike planes, you are working in only two dimensions and in restricted space, plus you have far more other objects in close proximity, so the challenges in making auto-pilots for planes are not really more than tangentially applicable.
Again, nobody is saying it'll be easy. Just not impossible due to arguments based on weather, time-limited decision making, or other purely technical challenges. The only really valid arguments are ones like I made as a joke - how do you go outside the parameters of point-to-point travel, like slowly rolling down the Red Mile honking your horn at pedestrians? What about taking a truck off-roading, or an ambulance onto the tarmac at an airport? Those are the kind of free-form, difficult to define problems that actually pose a real challenge.